At twelve o'clock on the sixteenth day some natives' smoke was seen
straight on our course, and also some of their foot-marks. The days
throughout this march had been warm; the thermometer at twelve
o'clock, when we let the camels lie down, with their loads on, for an
hour, usually stood at 94, 95, or 96 degrees, while in the afternoon
it was some degrees hotter. On Saturday, the 25th of September, being
the sixteenth day from the water at the Boundary Dam, we travelled
twenty-seven miles, still on our course, through mallee and spinifex,
pines, casuarinas, and quandong-trees, and noticed for the first time
upon this expedition some very fine specimens of the Australian
grass-tree, Xanthorrhoea; the giant mallee were also numerous. The
latter give a most extraordinary appearance to the scenes they adorn,
for they cheat the eye of the traveller into the belief that he is
passing through tracts of alluvial soil, and gazing, upon the
water-indicating gum-trees. This night we reached a most abominable
encampment; there was nothing that the camels could eat, and the
ground was entirely covered with great bunches of spinifex. Before us,
and all along the western horizon, we had a black-looking and scrubby
rise of very high sandhills; each of us noticed its resemblance to
those sandhills which had confronted us to the north and east when at
Youldeh.
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